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Title: Deconstructing Anarchy Author: Donatella Di Cesare Date: July 2021 Language: en Topics: ontological anarchism, philosophy Source: https://illwill.com/deconstructing-anarchy Notes: The following text was first delivered as a talk during Anarchē, a two-day conference curated by the Institute for Cultural Inquiry in Berlin. Here Italian philosopher Donatella Di Cesare explores the possibility of releasing the anarchic ontology concealed within the anarchist tradition.
Although sometimes tempered by nostalgic overtones, the current meaning
of the word “anarchy” remains pejorative. It is taken as the negation of
principle and command, but even more often as the absence of government
and therefore as disorder.
Sovereignty is thus legitimized as the only condition for order, the
sole alternative to the crippling absence of government. Anarchy becomes
another way of indicating the wild chaos that would rage in the
unlimited space beyond state sovereignty. This is why the history of the
word and its uses goes far beyond semantic interest and reveals a
conception of political architecture that has grown stronger over the
centuries.
Hobbes’ successful narrative is at work here. Established to overcome
the chaos of nature from which civil conflict must continually arise,
sovereign power would be the result of a shared pact, of a willing
submission to authority. Hobbes goes so far as to make the state a
“person,” an almost anthropomorphic figure whose internal sovereignty,
absolute and unquestionable, corresponds to an external sovereignty
embodied by the other sovereign states. In a move destined to have
long-lasting effects, it projects the Leviathan beyond its borders, the
beast of primitive chaos, chosen as the emblem of state power. Wild
unruliness, restrained within, is instead unleashed outside in the
permanent virtual war between the state wolves, the sovereign
Leviathans.
The dichotomy between inside and outside, sovereignty and anarchy, runs
through all of modern thought. Right up to the present day it imposes a
hierarchy of problems, prescribes solutions, justifies principles: above
all that of the obedience to sovereign power. Needless to say, value
judgments are introduced: on the one hand, internal space, where one can
aim at living well, where progress, justice, democracy and human rights
are affirmed; and on the other, external space, where at best survival
is a given, where only the vague cosmopolitan projects of a
confederation of peoples seem possible, if not the re-proposition of a
world state.
Globalization changes the scenario but does not actually challenge the
dichotomy between sovereignty and anarchy. It does, however, broaden the
perspective, revealing the limits of a politics predicated on
traditional borders, unable to see beyond them. The landscape appears
more complicated than ever because, while the nation-states continue to
impose the regulatory framework of events, the real and virtual spaces
that open up between one border and another are being populated by other
protagonists. This leads us to take leave of the dichotomy between the
inside and the outside, the civilized and the uncivilized, between order
and chaos.
To find a way in an unknown landscape we would need suitable maps, which
do not presently exist. Still, new phenomena such as global migrations
allow a glimpse of what is happening on the outside. Similarly, current
revolts are largely taking place beyond sovereignty, in the open space
that has always been relegated to anarchy. This openness should be
understood not only as a boundary between one place and another, but
also as a fissure, as an interstitial space within the internal
scenario. The revolt that undermines the archē — the principle and order
of political architecture, of the state-centric order — is an anarchic
revolt. It violates state borders, denationalizes the supposed citizens,
alienates them and renders them temporarily stateless, invites them to
proclaim themselves resident foreigners.
The undisputed sovereignty of the state, considered an indispensable
means and a supreme end, remains the defining criterion which maps the
contemporary scene and outlines the limits of political philosophy. The
good administration of the pólis is judged from this perspective —
without any critique of the ways in which the pólis is constituted. The
paradigmatic case is Rawls’ theory of justice. Political philosophy
relaunches powerful fictions: from that of a mythical contract to which
every citizen consents, to that of birth which, by way of a signature,
creates membership in a nation and authorizes return to the homeland. As
if borders were ineluctable, as if a community governed by genetic
descent were self-evident. Such presuppositions are taken as natural
givens and thus excluded from politics, or rather: depoliticized. But
then a political philosophy would be based on a non-political
foundation. Faced with a philosophy that remains confined within state
boundaries, the need arises for an anarchic trans-politics, oltre
politica.
How can the word “anarchy” be redeemed, if not through anarchic
archaeology? We look to the Greek context. The compound comes from
joining the privative prefix a- or an- (as in atonal, aniconic, or
atopia) to the verb árcho, to command. In short, anarchía means absence
of command, lack of government, want of order. As early as Homer,
ánarchos meant a group without leadership.
Closely connected with the military and juridical spheres in the
classical period, anarchía assumed increasingly nebulous meanings
without losing its privative force. Its two aspects mirror each other:
absence of government on the one side, but also lawbreaking and revolt
on the other. As the great historian of anarchism, Max Nettlau, wrote:
“The Greek term anarchy refers to individuals who consciously spurned
authority and rejected government; only when they began to be opposed
and persecuted did the name come to designate those dangerous rebels who
endangered order.”
Interesting, however, are the first reflections on anarchy in the pólis.
Tremendous and deadly specters haunt the city. Aeschylus warns against
excess and praises life, bíos, that is “neither anarchy nor tyranny,”
neither ánarchos nor despotoúmenos. Already here anarchy and tyranny
appear to be the two looming threats. But in the end, only anarchy is
the real political risk. Sophocles has Creon say as much: “The decreed
leader of the city, whoever he may be, must be obeyed [...]. There is no
worse misfortune than anarchy.” In the Laws, Plato takes up Sophocles’
warning almost to the letter: “Every human society is destined by nature
to have a leader.” And again: “Anarchy must be absolutely eliminated
from the life of every human being and also from the animals that serve
him.”
But for Plato, anarchy is not merely an unnatural disorder. In a more
political sense it represents the inseparable shadow of democracy, the
perennial nightmare of its ruin. The same is true in Aristotle. Although
it evokes similar compound words such as “monarchy” or “oligarchy,”
there is no doubt that anarchy is seen by both as non-constitution. The
negation of the privative alpha prevails. Condemned to a dark and
indistinct nebula, the absence of command defies imagination and eludes
the reach of thought schooled on kósmos and péras, on order and limit.
Even concrete disorder has many faces: that of tarachē and stásis, of
sedition and civil war. That which escapes the archē is excluded from
the pólis. This exclusion will have decisive effects on political
theory.
In the transition from Greek to Latin, a further meaning comes to light.
In Latin, archē is mainly translated as principium. It is then clear
that archē is anything but monolithic, split as it is between two
meanings: origin or principle on the one hand, command or rule on the
other. This doubling also applies to the verb archō, which means, “to
take the lead, to precede, to guide,” but also “to rule, to command.”
That which comes first leads the way, the beginning commands, the origin
governs — not only birth, but also growth, development, history.
That beginning and command should converge is not at all obvious. The
beginning claims the command — the command claims the beginning. As
Agamben puts it, the “prestige of origin” may explain why the semantic
discrepancy underlying archē is usually received as self-evident.
After all, why should the first be the leader? And why should the ruler
be the first? Very different meanings are brought closer until they
overlap and collide. But perhaps it is precisely the word archē – its
prestige acquired by habit — that may have dictated the coincidence.
Inauguration and command — as Greek has it, followed by many other
languages — are intimately connected, a consubstantial whole. The
repercussions are theological, political, and philosophical.
An an-archic archaeology, which is not only a ruinology, but also
defuses, disempowers, and deconstructs the arché, cannot but unearth the
archaic complicity. It brings to light that alliance of power,
disconnects principle and command.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in the wake of the French
Revolution, anarchy increasingly became a positive concept. It took a
place among the forms of government. Proudhon’s famous claim that
“anarchy is order without domination” marks a before and an after.
Except, the turn has ended up producing a structural collapse and led to
the erasure of that prefixed alpha at the root of anarchy. Herein lies
the problem of classical anarchism which, from Godwin to Bakunin, has
fallen into the trap of naively understood relations of force. Consider
the very modern way of understanding both the subject and the state that
culminates in a Manichaean vision: if the subject were by nature good
and the state bad, it would be enough to overturn the scheme offered by
Hobbes’ Leviathan, whereby the good state redeems the human individual
otherwise doomed to wolfishness. Precisely this simplification has not
worked — not even in politics.
Modernity, of which anarchism has been the child, constitutes the
impasse. Those metaphysical limits within which it remains caught and
which end up having inevitable political repercussions are now evident.
Anarchists, not fully realizing the subversive potential, enclose
anarchy in an archē, making of it a principle and a command. Hence the
naïveté, the illusions, the mistakes. This emerges in the vision of the
individual who faces power, is struggling in the dilemma of seizing it
once and for all but without allowing himself to be taken possession of.
Precisely this refusal of any mediation, together with a reductive
conception of power, assimilated to a scourge, has condemned the
anarchist movement to a series of defeats. This failure is all the more
serious because anarchy, understood as the autonegation of power, should
have opened up a new political space. Yet it is as if the anarchists
refused to inhabit that bottomless abyss from which another politics
could have anarchically arisen. Instead they took cover behind the
archic foxhole of a principle.
Is it possible to save ‘anarchy’ from anarchism today? Is there still
any chance today, and if so, how?
With its tragic past and its impossible future, anarchism seems to have
been relegated to a proud and stubborn but also esoteric and cultic
memory. Its sacred texts, assembled in an inviolable canonical corpus,
lay claim to faith and observance. The anarchists seem largely
institutionalized: they refer to a liturgy, they follow a catechism,
they cultivate the unshakable certainty that every answer is contained
in those texts of nineteenth- and twentieth-century orthodoxy.
This can be confirmed by the historical reconstructions which, despite
some slight differences, have fossilized around the same commonplaces,
the same scansions, the same doctrinal and ideological dogmas that have
been established and ratified over the centuries. The epic repeats
itself: after the precursors, a succession is opened by Godwin, followed
by Proudhon; the river then splits between the current inaugurated by
Stirner, champion of radical individualism, and that initiated by
Kropotkin, exponent of collectivism. The summit is reached with Bakunin.
Surrounding him are a multitude of figures whose worldviews are often at
odds with each other. Everything then comes to a standstill — apart from
a few exceptions, such as Murray Bookchin and Noam Chomsky — in the
first decades of the twentieth century. The official history of
anarchism is, in short, no different from any other historiography with
its paradigms, its dogmas, its principles. Fideistic petrification runs
the risk of winding up in gloomy sectarianism and catastrophic
stagnation.
We may well be tempted to suppose that the bell for the end has been
rung for some time now, were it not for the fact that the torch of
anarchy has never been extinguished. Heterodox and subversive, the
Circle-A, perhaps the most widespread political symbol in the world,
exceeds classic iconography and shows a vitality that goes beyond
traditional anarchism.
The economy of the archive opposes the an-archic impulse. There emerges
then a need to not archive anarchism, or rather, to not let it be
archived. Archive fever afflicts the anarchist, that dissident angel who
is called on to not forget that in the order of the beginning, as in
that of the command the archē is a fiction. The alternative would be the
embarrassing figure of an institutional anarchist claiming exclusive
access to the true memory, to ownership of the texts, to the arcane and
patriarchal power of an authentic origin. In his impossible nostalgia,
he would only have the keys to a house inhabited by ghosts. It is here
that the unarchivable anarchism must act to escape the violence of the
old archives. Even their own.
Silent by vocation, anarchism will always be the destroyer of every
archive. Destroying means here deconstructing, interpreting, reading
deeply into archaeological and genealogical excavations so as to
disarticulate the corpus of texts and desegregate the semantics of the
archive.
In recent decades an anarchic vein in philosophy has emerged. This is
not surprising, given that continental thought is characterized by its
unfolding from the abyssal depths that it can no longer avoid.
Heidegger was the pioneer in destroying official pathways of all sorts.
He inaugurated what can be called “post-fundamentalism.” If Husserl
remains kept by a conception of philosophy that still required an
“ultimate foundation,” for Heidegger it is time to take leave of all the
errors of metaphysics, to say farewell to any uncontested, stable and
firm foundation whenever that foundation turns out to be broken and
precarious. This is so in the case of that foundation of the universe, a
status to which the modern subject promoted itself: the sovereign who,
self-assured, sure of founding itself in its autonomy, should instead
recognize itself as having been “thrown” into the world, as being
inexorably temporal and irreversibly finite.
The event that shakes the ultimate foundation literally upends
philosophy, shakes it up, leaves it cracked and fissured, leaves it
open. The bottomless abyss of every foundation is thus unsealed.
Ab-grund is therefore the name that, preserving within the very word
itself the crucial gap, calls to mind what is by now an abyssal
un-foundation.
One should not, however, misunderstand Heidegger’s gesture, which is
limited to taking note of that event. It is not a question of denying or
refuting. Rather, it is a matter of admitting that undisputed
foundations are no longer given. This also applies to as many mirages
connected to a whole series of well-known, much-invoked foundations,
including: being, substance, essence, structure, universality, identity,
gender, state, and nation. Heidegger does not abandon the territory of
metaphysics, but remains there to oversee its disintegration, to dig
down into it, to let the abyss rise through the cracks.
Post-foundationalist philosophy, which questions every archē, takes
leave of the archic act. There are many names that could be mentioned.
The Grand Hotel Abyss, which had already welcomed members of the
Frankfurt School, Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse, has not
closed its doors. Other guests come and go, with different looks and new
perspectives.
A prominent place is occupied by Reiner Schürmann, author of Heidegger
on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy, published for the first
time in French in 1982, in English in 1987. One could read his pages as
a long commentary that aims to democratize Heidegger, i.e., to show that
he does not mythologize the origin, that he does not assert the
principle, nor simply identify himself with the Führerprinzip. Instead,
he thinks the anarchic dissolution of all archē.
Quickly leaving politics behind, Schürmann focuses attention on the
deconstruction of metaphysics, a project that is neither innocent nor
harmless. In order to bring to light the disruptive charge latent in the
broken foundation, he proposes a paradoxical expression: “the principle
of anarchy.” The contradiction between the two terms is evident.
Schürmann warns against any attempt at reconciliation or overcoming. The
“principle of anarchy” is an anarchic principle which, by destituting
itself, prevents anarchy from becoming, in turn, a principle. In the
history of the principles that have governed the epochs of the world,
there is still a paradoxical anarchic principle, prelude to the
overthrow of every principle, which carries anarchy inscribed within
itself, as destiny.
Unavoidable, therefore, is the transition to an-archic history that
opens up new scenarios. However, the political scenarios remain nebulous
because, according to Schürmann, politics has always been archic, has
always been configured around an archē. Not even what he calls the
“anarchism of power,” in which he also includes Marcuse, is an
exception. Here, however, looms an impasse against which Schürmann
struggles without making any headway. If, in fact, political anarchy can
only be reconsidered in the light of ontological anarchy, the reverse is
also true, and ontological anarchy cannot but be translated into
political anarchy.
A similar difficulty reappears in other philosophers who contribute to
the anarchic deconstruction of every archism. How can we not mention
Derrida? His words in an interview are emblematic: “I am not an
anarchist. [...] Deconstruction is undoubtedly anarchic; it would be in
principle, if such a thing could be said. It puts into question the
archē, the beginning and the commandment.”
In short: sharing an anarchic ontology is not yet the same thing as
being anarchist. But the question cannot be closed abruptly by an
ostentatious disavowal of all constraints. The relationship between
philosophy and anarchism, which seems almost like a missed encounter, is
much more ambiguous and complex than what, at first glance, one might
suppose.
It is in the name of anarchy that anarchism is criticized. It is a
question of letting emerge the betrayal of anarchy, whether by being
enclosed in an archic principle, starting with that of order as proposed
by Proudhon, or by being consigned, in specular play, to the formless
disorder of explosion. This is the internal contradiction of an
anarchism that does not question its own principles. Levinas used a
provocative phrase; in fact he used it twice, to drive the point home:
“Anarchy does not reign.” And again: “Anarchy cannot be sovereign, like
an archē.”
Philosophy pushes anarchism, in a sort of almost critical self-analysis,
to recover its own repressed anarchic ontology. The political
repercussions are profound. It will no longer be possible to replace one
sovereignty with another, nor to understand power in a Manichaean way.
Old mistakes, costly ones, return to memory.
Can we really believe that the anarchic deconstruction of anarchism does
not have anything to do with this tradition? A denial comes from the
references to those great events that have marked the history of the
anarchist movement: from the Paris Commune of 1871 to the Catalonia in
1936. As if in these events an anarchic politics was already
concretized, eluding the theories of the time and their archic schemes.
Explicit references recur not by chance in the exponents of more recent
philosophy that has developed the thought of the “political”: from
Claude Lefort to Cornelius Castoriadis, from Miguel Abensour to Jacques
Rancière. The common thread that unites them despite their differences
is a critique of the archē understood both as a philosophical principle
and as a political command.
Perhaps the time has come for a new anarchism that works on the limit
concepts and conceptual limits of a sclerotic legacy, one that brings to
light the petrified and repressed anarchy and, preserving the privative
alpha that denies and opposes established principle, that also looks
beyond the frontiers of archic sovereignty and political architecture.
July 2021